This article was first published in January 1993, as part of a series in the SN when the new PPP government was already being accused of “authoritarianism”. David De Caries and I had agreed that the premises of the still dominant Marxist paradigm ignored non-economic sources of angst at our peril.
“Applying concepts formulated by the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, we should note there is a reservoir of power in civil society, which may be relatively autonomous from the state. This power is exercised through the cultural hegemony that the dominant group within civil society establishes over the minds of the populace. This dominant group may, but does not necessarily always, also control the state or economy.
We may define hegemony as the moral and philosophical leadership, which a group seeks to establish in a society, through the active consent of the major groups in the society. These moral and philosophical ideas control people’s perceptions and consequently, their activities. These ideas, in a nutshell, form the basis of the popular culture, which the populace further accepts as “common sense”. These ideas and values form a discourse disseminated by religious groups, the schools, the political groups, cultural activists’, the law and the media and all of the other socialisation mechanisms of society.
We can understand how this process of hegemony operates by looking historically at the post amelioration period when our now dominant “Creole culture” was solidified. The British White Colonial Bureaucracy controlled the state, while the planters and other Whites controlled the economy and civil society. Viewing their interests, vis a vis the African masses as coincident, the three power centers cooperated in imposing a unified transformist hegemony. We had at this time an Integral State, the goal of which was to make the slave or free African/Coloured actively accept his condition of subservience – thus sparing the funds, and anxiety, of more direct coercion mechanisms. It was the substitution of mental slavery for physical slavery. The African had to be convinced that he was a still “savage” being civilized. We use the dissemination of religious beliefs to illustrate the process.
The approved religion was Christianity and its activities were funded by a combination of state, planter and private resources. The problem was not Christianity per se, but the manner in which it was interpreted by Whites and taught to Africans. Firstly, the African indigenous religions in which the the Divine was worshipped in its creations such as rivers and trees, was derided as “animism”. Secondly, even the avowed intent of the salvation of ‘souls” of the Africans was actually to create a pliable work force. Thirdly Christianity was transmuted into a “white” religion in which the Black African would always be second class; Jesus would always be blonde and blue eyed … and he was in the image of God!
The fact that Africans had a link with Christianity, which preceded that of the British, or of Western Europe for that matter, was ignored. The fact that Africans had a greater legitimacy in asserting that Jesus was Black was ignored. Egypt was denied as being part of “savage” Africa. Rewards of the hereafter were stressed and the blessedness of the meek and poor were extolled. Never mind that the White preachers and their sponsors were neither noticeably meek or poor. Even though the British admitted the accomplishments of Islamic culture in Spain for instance, they would not concede that this was an African achievement, and that Africans were exposed to Islam even before Indians and that many African slaves were Muslims.
Now, once the main purpose of the hegemon has been achieved [the willing acceptance by the dominated of the unequal power relations], the hegemon will be willing to make innocuous compromises depending on the specific circumstances. Thus after the Christianizing experience was duplicated in all aspects of culture by the schools etc. and the framework of the debilitating Creole Culture discourse was created, pliant coloured and Black ex-slaves were accepted on the lower rungs of “society”. As Rex Nettleford noted, this culture was very much in place by the time the indentured Indians arrived. Retentions of African culture – drumming, dancing, some food etc. – were seen as “lower class”. But these were valorised in the post independent governments as “national culture” in which Indian culture was defined out as “ethnic”.
